Fandemic Tour heads to NRG Center Sept. 14-16

Sean Patrick Flanery, pictured right with Boondock Saints co-star Norman Reedus, is a guest at this weekend’s Fandemic Tour Houston in the NRG Center in Houston. Reedus is also a guest.

Sean Patrick Flanery, pictured right with Boondock Saints co-star Norman Reedus, is a guest at this weekend’s Fandemic Tour Houston in the NRG Center in Houston. Reedus is also a guest.

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Sean Patrick Flanery, pictured right with Boondock Saints co-star Norman Reedus, is a guest at this weekend’s Fandemic Tour Houston in the NRG Center in Houston. Reedus is also a guest.

Sean Patrick Flanery, pictured right with Boondock Saints co-star Norman Reedus, is a guest at this weekend’s Fandemic Tour Houston in the NRG Center in Houston. Reedus is also a guest.

Fandemic Tour heads to NRG Center Sept. 14-16

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Get ready, Houston, as Fandemic Tour rolls in this weekend.

The new convention, rescheduled from 2017 due to Hurricane Harvey, will fill the NRG Center with guests, panels, autograph and photo opportunities, and more Sept. 14-16.

The tour is the brainchild of former Wizard World CEO John Macaluso, whom guest James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville) said puts on a great show for fans and staff alike.

“I have known John Macaluso for many years, and he has also run, I think, the best cons,” Marsters said. “He spends extra to make sure that everyone has a good time…but also that the people that work for him all across the board are enjoying themselves which translates to the fans having a really great time.”

Marsters, who was part of Macaluso’s inaugural Fandemic Tour event in Sacramento in June, said it was like a reunion for him.

“I think it was his first Fandemic coming back (to producing cons),” Marsters said. “I got to see a lot of people that worked for him that I hadn’t seen for a while. It was kind of like a reunion actually.”

Marsters said as he’s filming at the moment, cons are his opportunities to get out and where he gets to meet interesting people.

“I met someone who helped design the Mars rover at a convention,” Marsters said. “They were dressed as a Wookie. I met a young woman who spoke 16 languages. I met another young woman who was working on the large Hadron collider in Europe…I find that fans tend to be smart and funny and don’t take themselves too seriously and I think that’s a really good combination.”

Guest Sean Patrick Flanery (Boondock Saints) is excited for the Houston leg of the tour as it’s his hometown.

“It’s where I was brought up, I went to Saint Mark’s Episcopal down by the Medical Center, I went to Quail Valley Elementary out in Sugar Land, I went to Missouri City Junior High, I went to Quail Valley Junior High, Dulles High School, University of St. Thomas downtown in the Museum District, all of my formative years were spent in Houston,” Flanery said. “Although I was born in Lake Charles, LA, I consider myself a Texan, and more specifically a Houston boy, it’s my stomping grounds.”

Flanery said he and his friend Norman Reedus (Boondock Saints, The Walking Dead) have been doing conventions with Macaluso since 2010 and joined Fandemic Tour because of him.

“When he started the Fandemic Tour, he’s one of our closest friends and we obviously wanted to do it with him,” Flanery said. “ Because I live so far away, I’m a West Coast guy and a Texas guy, and Norman is an East Coast guy, we’ll meet at some of these events to spend a few days together. So when Macaluso came up with the idea to do a Fandemic Tour, we were like ‘absolutely, let’s do that’.”

Flanery, like Marsters, commented on the uniqueness of Macaluso’s events.

“The first time we’d ever went to one was in 2010, when we met Macaluso. You go into it with a little bit of ‘ah, what is this gonna be like’ and we had an absolute ball,” Flanery said. “There’s a 12-foot Chewbacca walking around, there’s all these events and parties and get togethers at night, it was such an odd but entertaining event, unlike anything we’d ever been to and we fell in love with doing these things.”

He said that while conventions do have similarities, each is run a bit differently, and called Macaluso’s the “pinnacle of fun events”.

“With some of these events, you’re all on your own and you’ll have a panel,” Flanery said. “At Macaluso’s events, all the panels have a theme, there’s events at night, there’s isolated events for you and your friends, it’s just a very different production. I think Macaluso is one of the first people that created an event that looks after all parties.”

Fandemic Tour Houston will feature a slate of guests from film and television, including Chuck Norris of Walker, Texas Ranger, Delta Force and The Expendables fame; Reedus, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Steven Yeun, and Pollyanna McIntosh from AMC’s The Walking Dead; Bruce Campbell of the Evil Dead franchise; Tom Welling, Michael Rosenbaum, and John Schneider from Smallville; Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn and Chris Sullivan from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise; Marsters and Clare Kramer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Flanery and David Della Rocco from Boondock Saints; Jason David Frank from Power Rangers; Dean Cain of Lois and Clark fame; Adam Baldwin from Firefly; and WWE’s Paige.